QWOP
The archive has not found a surviving copy.
2010·The social era·skill
Four keys, one sprinter, and a game designed so that almost nobody can move forwards.
At a glanceThe facts
- Spread in
- 2010
- Began as
- Something you played
- Where it started
- web
- Origin
- Not an upload originally
- Available
- Not held by ViralWorld
What this wasThe story
You control an Olympic sprinter named Qwop. Q and W drive his thighs; O and P drive his calves. There is no run button. The result, for essentially every player, is a man collapsing face-first onto a track he has travelled two metres of, over and over, while a small crowd watches.
It is one of the earliest games to go viral because watching somebody fail at it is funnier than playing it, which made it a staple of the first generation of reaction videos and Let's Plays. Bennett Foddy, a philosopher by training, built the frustration deliberately, and QWOP is the founding text of the deliberately-punishing genre he later refined.
It has been the subject of machine-learning papers about whether an algorithm can learn to run it, covered by the BBC among others, and its name became a verb for any real-world stumble. Foddy went on to make Getting Over It, which is the same argument at greater length.
Why it is here: it got out of its own corner of the internet fast
This began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on web.
Where it came fromWhat we know
There is no original upload to identify: this did not begin as one. There is no copy of it here either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is what this page can tell you.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on web.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
